You’re getting news about kickstarters before they launch, because the ‘launch’ itself has lost its glamour/news worthyness due to the volume of launches. So the news moment shifts to x days before launch.

It is in itself a proof of this fatigue …

At the same time it is the same thing every industry has been doing since internet made it easier to spread news.
We’ve gone from reading about stuff months after release in print … to reading about projects as they are barely an idea that a journalist discovers. All of this happened because the media need to get the maximum amount of hits as fast as possible. Classic companies could alleviate a lot of this pressure by enforcing NDA’s and embargos for product announcements/reviews, but such things don’t work when the reward (more views) is greater than any punishment available or possible.

As for Kickstarter exclusives.
Is it really that different to all those small run products that the garage shop companies in hobby gaming have been doing since the dawn of time ?
Because unless you’ve got the likes of GW any production run is going to be pretty small and ‘limited’ (a lot of miniatures rules in the historical section can be considered this).

GW itself has done a lot of those ‘exclusive’ production runs for games outside of their main product lines (Space Hulk being the most obvious one as well as lots of those models + ‘game’ combos).

The real difference is the fact that Kickstarter has a much bigger presence and thus creates much more awareness of this.
And as a result more companies have latched onto that business model.

The internet and things like Kickstarter have allowed us more aware of how the sausages get made.